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“... stories, reminded me stylistically of some of the Scottish writers I admired, like James Kelman, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Janice Galloway. In the best of his work, the narrative is fragmented; there are sudden ellipses and omissions. He shifts aim slightly, deliberately missing the obvious dramatic bullseye: in ‘They Gave Her a Rise’, the explosion at ...”

“... accurate. An Experiment seems kooky now, but H.G. Wells took an interest, and so did the Tolkien/Lewis Inklings, and J.B. Priestley, among others. Dunne was an aeronautical engineer and former soldier, and part of the appeal of his book was probably that he dressed his speculations with the correct amount of scientific apparatus. It is also evident from ...”

“... respond to events that took place centuries ago but continue to reverberate? The cultural critic Michael Rothberg proposes the term ‘implicated subject’, something more than ‘bystander’ and more complicated than ‘beneficiary’. No one alive now whose family received wealth from slavery can be considered guilty. But that doesn’t mean, in ...”

“... was equal parts Old Hollywood and Brancusi mask, Lisa Marie was famous for her relationships with Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage – and for being Elvis’s daughter. Before her death, in 2023, of cardiac arrest caused by complications from weight-loss surgery, she had been recording tapes of material for a memoir. These recordings form the basis of From ...”

“... Pasha whose balls looked like four milk-white horses’, and inventions in the style of Lewis Carroll: ‘She getting laden with gvalk and fromck and painful interest’. Usually, however, they mean nothing at all. Purely cryptographic pages not only cancel the meaning of the Mallock original but seem to celebrate joyfully the impossibility of any ...”

“... of historians showed that constitutional history lacked genuine explanatory power. Around 1930, Lewis Namier highlighted the self-interested – rather than statesmanlike – motivations of 18th-century politicians, while Herbert Butterfield pointed out the present-minded distortions of the past found in grand constitutional ...”

“... in 1982 after the invasion of the Falkland Islands, don’t happen very often. More recently, Michael Howard’s reluctance as home secretary to accept blame for the failures of the prison service introduced some new distinctions into the concept of ministerial responsibility. In 1995 Howard sacked Derek Lewis, the ...”

“... scholarship which Malone sought to overturn (evidenced, for example, by Peter Seary’s Lewis Theobald and the Editing of Shakespeare, 1990, or Jean Marsden’s The Reimagined Text, 1995), and despite the technological advances which have enabled Chadwyck-Healey to put all the important editions of Shakespeare from the quartos through Malone and ...”

“... book), Malcolm’s central argument is simple enough. Long before the acknowledged masterpieces of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, long before the English reached their nonsensical apogee in the reign of Victoria, a few privileged Elizabethans were already developing a surreal and proto-Carrollean sense of humour, cultivated most often in the elaborately ...”

“... the mind’s dreams of power. The piece of the story that doesn’t come from Berkeley comes from Lewis Carroll, who provides an epigraph for the fiction called ‘The Circular Ruins’: ‘And if he left off dreaming about you … ’ The counterpart of this dream, and maybe its real provocation, is the writer’s feeling of having betrayed the world by ...”

“... chase, creates a sense of wild freedom, of innocent anarchy: let’s say, something in the line of Lewis Carroll, which is quite different from the oppression created by the ever-appearing Professor, which is different again from the apocalyptic semblance of the victory of evil. In all three cases, though, the ordinary world is transfigured or abandoned, and ...”

“... where the waiters impersonate Buddy Holly, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Donna Reed, Martin and Lewis and so on, is funnier than the filming of a set where people do this. When Travolta, eating here with Uma Thurman, orders the Douglas Sirk steak, the joke is all the better for being so pointless and casual. And there is a moment where the movie almost ...”

“... but which turned out to be a marathon. The pack thins and the stayers are revealed in the lead (Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach and Adrian Berg, for example). With so many of the tedious political attitudes of the artists of the Sixties discredited, those who have been slow to slough them off (following Kitaj’s example once again) have found themselves ...”

“... Disraeli, a miscellany of works which I also passed by, Disraeli not being my favourite man – Michael Foot can have him; Asquith, 600 pages of love-letters to a girl not half his age; Churchill, first of two volumes of biography by an American writer, a disquisition on his political philosophy, and a massive collection of documents relating to his career ...”

“... his superhuman consumption of Player’s, and all the benzedrine, could hardly have helped. But Michael Davidson, an early mentor, was not alone in seeking a more symbolic explanation and in seeing ‘those singular corrugations’ as the ‘seismic result of terrific intellectual commotion’. Auden seemed in later years to have been encased behind a great ...”